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This chapter presents a new theory of union behavior that helps to explain the motivations of union leaders in restraining worker protest. It argues that democracy influences industrial relations in two ways. First, political competition has compelled major parties to deepen union-party ties because historically parties have relied on union organizational capacity and the vote of the industrial working class to win elections. Second, democracy facilitates industrial peace by encouraging institutionalized grievance resolution through the promotion of freedom of association and collective bargaining (FACB) rights. The chapter begins with a discussion of the incentives for individual union leaders to engage in militant protest and aggressive bargaining. It then explains the role of democracy in reducing industrial conflict; how partisan ties encourage union leaders to restrain worker protest and how this impetus is common across the ideological spectrum; and how labor legislation promotes economic performance by enhancing third-party mediation and promoting worker rights.

Chapter 4 presents conflict episodes in Romania and Ukraine centred on problems of un-timely or low pay, layoffs, and work overload. In all the cases under study such issues led to worker protests. I study how trade unions reacted to the protests and whether and how their reactions furthered the resolution of worker demands. In the first two cases unions face employers over issues of timely or higher pay and layoffs. The unions are constrained to refrain from strike actions as strikes might push employers to relocate their businesses or the costs might prove too high for workers. The next cases introduce a severe limitation to union action: the plant’s management prevents the trade union from representing workers by turning it into a “distributive” union - offering it funds to distribute certain benefits (access to health care, housing, holiday facilities) among workers. The case shows how conflict emerges at a plant despite the presence of a distributive union and how the union responded to conflict from below. The last two cases introduce an element that disrupts distributive unionism: the wage arrears crisis, severing the links between management and union and pushing the latter to respond to pressures from the workers.

This chapter highlights the key trends in Japan's labor movement as they have developed in the form of social conflict and protest, drawing on an original data set of protest events in Japan. The data set charts the type of actor, form of protest, and target of the protest for each reported event. These events are a sample taken from key periods in the transformation of Japan's political economy. The findings are used to consider the changing trends in worker-led protest throughout the period of neoliberalization. The results identify heightened contestation, with reported events undertaken increasingly by precarious and nonregular workers using different methods of protest. Ultimately, precarious workers have become increasingly mobilized, contributing to an increased frequency of protests and a greater proclivity toward more confrontational forms of protest activity.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rise of a nonregular workforce in Japan. Around the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, nonregular workers were identified as a key group whose members were suffering from low wages and insecure employment. As part of this growth in nonregular employment, Japan has also witnessed a growing number of workers' protests, which have both sought to highlight the plight of Japan's precarious workers and attempted to oppose and resist the new conditions that they were experiencing. Indeed, over the past twenty years, Japan has witnessed the emergence of a new form of labor activism. This book investigates the way in which Japanese capitalism has undergone a process of restructuring, with a particular focus on the workplace and how changing socioeconomic structures have affected workers. It explores how workers have responded and contributed to the construction of the Japanese political economy, as well as how the country's model of capitalism has been transformed as a result.

This chapter examines the intellectual influences on the small cohort of Caledonian and Kanak students who attended universities in France and experienced the May 1968 student–worker uprising. It first discusses the arrival of a number of New Caledonian students in France in the early 1960s, including Jean-Paul Caillard, Nidoish Naisseline, and Max Chivot, and how they actively imagined revolutionary utopias in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, and perhaps even the Caillou. It then considers how the Algerian conflict inspired francophone intellectuals to reflect on colonial settler psychology, and especially Third World decolonization and liberation. It also explores how Third World nationalism interacted with a radical West that had millenarian dreams of victory over “the establishment,” with particular emphasis on New Caledonian anticolonial activitists' views about socialist revolution. Finally, the chapter takes a look at the May 1968 student–worker protests in France, led by the so-called enragés (angry youth).